ENVIRONMENTALISM:
FROM THE CONTROL OF NATURE TO PARTNERSHIP
By Carolyn Merchant*
Abstract
In the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century, when environmental awareness over loss
of forests and depletion of soils was in its infancy, the long term goal of the betterment of
humankind through the control of nature was a significant advancement. The
experimental vision put forward by Francis Bacon and others enabled humanity to
understand science and manage nature. For the 21st century, however, the ethic of control
is giving way to one of partnership with the natural world. A partnership ethic entails a
viable, sustainable relationship in which connections to the global world are recognized
through science, technology, and ecological exchanges. It is an ethic in which humans
act to fulfill both humanity's vital needs and nature's needs while restraining human
hubris.
For an online audio lecture on this topic go to, http://nature.berkeley.edu/merchant and
click on Recent Publications.
The seventeenth century Scientific Revolution spanned the period between the
Renaissance and the Enlightenment during the expansion of pre-industrial capitalism. All
over Europe a flurry of new activities that transformed nature through machines and
inventions was taking place. Tunneling into the earth for coal and metals, building forges
for refining ores and hammering metals, constructing mills for wind and water power,
and erecting machines for lifting and boring provided humanity with a new sense of
power over nature. The development of the coal and iron industries, the enclosure of the
commons for wool production for the textile industry, the cutting of enormous tracts of
timber for shipbuilding, and the expansion of trade changed the natural landscape.
Knowledge of the crafts, mechanics, inventions, and the properties of matter was
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essential to creating a storehouse of reliable, replicable information about the practical
arts that would be available not just to the few, but to the many.1
Nature as Female
Nature for nearly everyone in the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution was
female. More than a metaphor, Nature was the servant of God in the mundane world—the
bringer and reproducer of life as well as the meter of rewards and punishments. Accepted
as both reality and metaphor by the lower, as well as the upper classes, Nature
represented a fusion of ancient, Renaissance, and Christian symbols. Depicted as female
by a host of artists, writers, philosophers, and ordinary people, Nature was a
personification of the cosmos, the earth, and the human writ-large.2
Like the human and the cosmos, nature, as a living being, had a body, soul, and
spirit. Nature personified had breasts, a bosom, and a womb, as well as circulatory,
reproductive, and elimination systems. For neoplatonists, nature
was the lower part of the world soul; for alchemists and natural
magicians, matter was to be manipulated and transformed into
higher metals, cures, potions, and pharmacopoeia.3
From: Athenasius Kircher,
Mundus Subterraneous, 1665
For Christians, Nature was the dispenser of God’s displeasure at mankind’s
disobedience—retribution for human sins. Failed harvests, drought, storms, disease, and
plagues resulted from human failure to obey the strictures of moral life. Nature was the
substance of the body—a fusion of the elements, the base instincts, and human bodily and
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moral weaknesses. All aspects of the body were symbolized by the female—the weaker
and more vulnerable sex. Matter, too, as female represented the lower order of nature.
Matter, like the female, was inconstant, changing, and corruptible. Matter, the body, and
the reproductive organs were sites of corruption by the devil. To deny this reality of daily
and moral life is to discount history itself.4
For most of human history, nature had the upper hand over human beings, and
humans fatalistically accepted the hand that nature dealt. People lived at the mercy of
nature's storms, droughts, frosts, and famines. They accepted fate while propitiating
nature with gifts, sacrifices, and prayer (often within hierarchical human relationships).
Failed harvests, famines, and droughts were considered God's, or the Great Spirit's, way
of blaming human beings for acting in an unethical way.
Only in the last few centuries have technologies and attitudes of domination
stemming from the Scientific Revolution turned the tables, enabling humans to threaten
nature with deforestation and desertification, chemical pollution, destruction of habitats
and species, nuclear fallout, and ozone depletion. Through mechanistic science,
technology, capitalism, and the Baconian hubris that the human race should have
dominion over the entire universe, humanity has gained an increasing ability to destroy
nature as we know it today. Some groups of people have gained great power over nature
and other human groups using the interlinked forces of science, politics, and religion.
Francis Bacon and Dominion Over Nature
In the early seventeenth century, Francis Bacon (1561-1626) forcefully
proclaimed a secular program for the domination of nature and a pathway to recovering
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the paradise lost by Adam and Eve. Due to the Fall from the Garden of Eden, Bacon
believed, the human race had lost its "dominion over creation." Bacon saw science and
technology as the way to control nature and thereby to recover the right to the original
garden given to the first parents: "Man by the Fall, fell at the same time
from his state of innocency and from his dominion over creation. Both
of these losses can in this life be in some part repaired; the former by
religion and faith, the latter by arts and science." Humans, he asserted,
could "recover that right over nature which belongs to it by divine bequest. . . ." Bacon's
narrative plot was thus a reversal from decline to progress—from the tragedy of the Fall
to the comedy of survival and recovery.5
Bacon used the language of nature as female to articulate an experimental
philosophy that would extract nature's secrets. He stated that not only were the secrets of
nature hidden "in certain deep mines and caves," but they could be wrested from nature's
grasp by miners and smiths, "the one searching into the bowels of nature, the other
shaping nature as on an anvil." The technologies of gunpowder, printing, and the magnet
could "help us to reveal the secrets still locked in 'nature's bosom.'"6
Francis Bacon and the Origins of Experimentation
Three early modern settings illustrate the methods of extracting nature's secrets
through the idea of the controlled experiment (toward which Bacon was tending)—the
courtroom, the anatomy theater, and the laboratory. The first example is the courtroom, a
setting with which Bacon was intimately familiar. He was an experienced practitioner of
the law, rising to ever higher offices during the reigns of Queen Elizabeth I and James I,
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from Learned Council (1603), Solicitor General (1607), Clerk of the Star Chamber
(1608), Attorney General (1613), and finally Lord Chancellor and Baron Verulam (1618).
Bacon used the term ”trial” to characterize an experiment. The interrogation of
nature was analogous to a judicial trial, in which the subject on the witness stand is
forced to answer questions in order to extract the truth (”the inquisition of truth”). In the
quest for understanding, the scientist ”must not think that the inquisition of nature is in
any part interdicted or forbidden.” In the case of Science v. Nature, the
scientist/inquisitor/judge/examiner faces the witness/examinee/nature on the stand.
Nature per se cannot speak but is privy to the facts and knowledge (secrets) to be
extracted. Nature must recognize the words of the questions put by the human examiner
as written in its/her own language and must in turn give reliable, repeatable answers in
that language. By analogy, the scientist designs an experiment in which nature is put to
the question in a confined, controlled space where the correct answers can be extracted
through inquisition. That confined, controlled space is Bacon’s third state of nature—that
is, nature in bonds, or ”nature in constraint, molded, and made as it were new by art and
the hand of man.”7
A second example is the anatomy theater. In Vesalius’ De
humani corporis fabrica (1543, 2nd ed. 1555), the title
page shows the public dissection, in the center of a
rotunda, of the body of a female criminal who has been
hanged. Her naked body with genitals exposed and
reproductive organs dissected lies at the center of a large
crowd of male observers with Vesalius himself standing
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over her and pointing to the secrets of her womb. The active mastery of the standing,
gesticulating male voyeurs contrasts with the passivity of the supine female object at
center stage. The only other clearly identifiable woman in Vesalius’s title page stands
between two pillars in the background peering from beneath a veil. She may be the
midwife who would have examined the condemned woman for evidence of pregnancy
before her execution. She exemplifies woman’s knowledge of woman’s secrets now
exposed to the vulgarity of the raucous crowd.8
The laboratory, as a third example of the
emerging idea of the contained, controlled
experiment, replicates the features of the
courtroom and the anatomy theater. It is an
enclosed space in which environmental
variables such as temperature, air pressure, dust, and moisture can be controlled. A
question is posed by the experimenter. She or he designs an apparatus that will answer
the questions around which the laboratory is itself organized (equipment, assistants,
recordation). The apparatus is subjected to a sequence of forces, impulses, or tests that
will elicit answers. The data are recorded by witnesses and explained in ways that will
reveal the secrets (truths) of nature. If reliable results are found, they can be repeated at a
future time and place by other experimenters and viewed by other witnesses. 9
The alchemist’s laboratory, from which Bacon drew inspiration, typically
comprised an array of furnaces, bellows, cauldrons, crucibles, presses, alembics, stills
(distillation equipment), jars, flasks, and mortars and pestles, along with animal
skeletons, herbs, powders, metals, and a variety of symbols, books, and recipes. In it, the
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alchemist searched for transmutations that would produce cures, potions, gold, and the
philosopher’s stone. Bacon’s ultimate goal was to transform the individualistic efforts of
the alchemist and the magus into a method of obtaining knowledge that would serve all
of humanity. Although Bacon did not use the term laboratory, his vision for workshops
with furnaces, distillation equipment, and various types of instruments and vessels drew
inspiration from the alchemist’s workhouse.
Bacon's New Atlantis (written in 1624 and published posthumously in 1627)
epitomized Bacon’s most mature conception of the laboratory experiment. Here, in the
visionary experiments conducted in Salomon’s House, the workers all contributed to
setting up ”trials” and recording data. Separate ”laboratories” (termed ”preparations and
instruments,” including ”perspective houses,” ”engine houses,” ”furnaces,” ”sound
houses,” ”mathematical houses,” ”parks and inclosures,” ”chambers,” and ”orchards and
gardens”) existed for the study, speeding up, and modification of the activities of plants
and animals, aquatic life, the metals, and the weather—all for the benefit of humankind.
The parks, gardens, caves, deep mines, wells, pools, streams,
and fountains were strategically sited to facilitate the
investigations; likewise, ”laboratories” were specifically
organized for dissections and surgeries, experiments with
medicines and poisons, and the creation of new species of
plants and animals. The research and recording of the results
were undertaken by apprentices, novices, and scientists. The
end of our ”foundation,” Bacon stated, is the ”knowledge of
8
causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to
the effecting of all things possible.”10
The idea of the controlled experiment toward which Bacon was tending is
exemplified by Robert Boyle's air pump in the
1660s. In Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes,
Boyle, and the Experimental Life, Steven Shapin
and Simon Schaffer analyze Boyle’s
experiments with the air-pump, in which living
things were subjected to the vacuum produced by the evacuation of air from a bell jar, as
viewed by witnesses. In the illustration, Scientia (depicted as female) points to Boyle
with her right elbow and to his air pump (epitome of the new experimental science) with
her left hand. Here Nature (the living things under experimentation in the bulb of the air
pump) is in bonds. In Bacon’s terms, ”she is put in constraint, moulded, and made as it
were new by art and the hand of man; as in things artificial.” The new method was
needed, stated Boyle (echoing Bacon), because ”some men care only to know nature,
others to command her.” The resulting truths were replicable in other times and places. A
reliable form of knowledge resulted, one that helped to reestablish the social and political
order left in disarray by the English Civil War.11
In 1768, Joseph Wright of Derby painted the
"Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump." In
Wright's painting a pet cockatoo is removed from a
cage (shown in the upper right corner), placed in a
bell jar, and the air evacuated. The experimenter's
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hand is placed near the stop cock and he holds the power to halt the evacuation and return
air to the jar to revive the bird. A old man stares at a human skull contemplating death. A
young girl covers her eyes to avoid viewing the impending horror, while a second girl
stares anxiously upwards, and a woman, unable to watch, gazes at the face of another
man who views the experiment directly. As Yaakov Garb has pointed out, the men and
women have different responses. The women are stereotypically emotional looking in
horror at the bell jar, hiding their eyes, or looking at the men, thereby experiencing the
results vicariously. The men, on the other hand, control the outcome via the stopcock,
stare directly at the experiment with open curiosity, or contemplate the larger
philosophical meaning of death. The men "witness" a scientific truth, the women
"experience" a dying bird. The painter has forced social norms about male and female
scientific responses to nature onto the audience. The experiment reflects the goals of
Francis Bacon's method. A question is asked of nature, a controlled experiment is
devised, and the results are witnessed and evaluated for their truth content.12
The Mechanistic Worldview
By the end of the seventeenth century, the synthesis of the experimental and
mathematical methods had given humanity the optimism that the control of nature and
the secular recovery of the Garden of Eden were both
possible. Francis Bacon's vision of dominion over creation
and Descartes's revival of the mathematical method for
knowing nature set up modernity's mechanistic view of
nature. God was re-envisioned as an engineer and
10
mathematician, nature as a machine to be manipulated by human ingenuity. Isaac
Newton's laws of mechanics and the principle of gravitation, put forward in his 1687
Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, described the actions of the worldmachine—the Enlightenment's ordered garden of nature. Newton's mechanical
worldview restored "law and order" to a society in chaos from the wars of religion, the
English civil war, and the collapse of Ptolemy's earth-centered cosmos. The view of
nature as a living organism with the female earth mother at its center had become a
machine to be constructed and reconstructed by the human engineer.
For mechanistic science, the changing imperfect world of everyday life partakes
of Plato's ideal world, hence it can be described, predicted,
and controlled, just as the physical machine can be controlled
by its human operator. Science depends on a structural reality
that allows for the possibility of control whenever phenomena
are predictable, regular, and subject to rules and laws. The assumption of the order of
nature is fundamental to the concept of power over nature, and both are integral parts of
the modern scientific worldview. Such a worldview is completely consistent with a
master narrative of remaking the world in the image of the Garden of Eden.
As E.J. Dijksterhuis characterized it in the mid-twentieth century:
That the adoption of the mechanistic view has had profound and far reaching
consequences for the whole of society is an historical fact which gives rise to the
most divergent opinions. Some commend it as a symptom of the gradual
clarification of human thought, of the growing application of the only method that
is capable of producing reliable results in every sphere of knowledge. . . . Others,
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though recognizing the outstanding importance it has had for the progress of our
theoretical understanding and our practical control of nature, regard it as nothing
short of disastrous in its general influence on philosophical and scientific thought
as well as on society.
Since the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, the mainstream narrative of
Western culture has been to recreate the entire earth in the image of the Garden of Eden.
The story is one of transforming wilderness and deserts into gardens. The Earth becomes
a garden planet. Forests and deserts as wilderness are transformed into farms. Lands are
cleared, deserts are irrigated to become garden farms.
Challenges to Mechanism
The optimism generated by the Enlightenment and the synthesis of the sciences of
mechanics, hydrology, thermodynamics, and electricity and magnetism by the late
nineteenth century were challenged in the twentieth century. The first challenge to the
mechanistic world view began with the science of ecology. Ecology deals not with
mechanism's closed systems, isolated from the environment, but with open systems in
which matter and energy are transferred across boundaries.
12
In 1866, German scientist Ernst Haeckel coined the term
Oekologie from the Greek word, oikos, or house. He suggested
a new science dedicated to the study of organisms in their
environments. The word oikos gives rise to both ecology and
economy. Ecology is the study of the household; economics is
the management of the household. Ecology in the United States has been attributed to
men such as Frederic Clements, Aldo Leopold, and Eugene Odum, but it was actually
introduced to the U.S. by a woman, Ellen Swallow Richards (1842-1911) in 1892.
Ellen Swallow began her career at Vassar College in 1871. She graduated in
chemistry, and then went on to MIT where she was admitted as a special student. In 1910
she received an honorary doctorate from Smith College.
At the time that Swallow entered MIT, women could not
receive higher degrees in the United States. Those who
wanted to go into science primarily went to Germany,
where German universities were granting doctorates to
women. Margaret Rossiter's book, Women Scientists in
America (vol. I) relates the development of women's education in science at boarding
schools and colleges in the mid to late 19th century, women’s work in attempting to
obtain doctorates, and their efforts to obtain positions in U.S. universities. If they
received a Ph.D. overseas and returned, they might be able to get a teaching position, but
upon marriage, they were released.13
At Vassar, Swallow majored in chemistry and went on to MIT as a special
student, where she incorporated the ideas of Frank Storer, a professor studying the
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atmosphere and the idea of earth from her future husband, Robert Richards. In 1892, in a
lecture to the Boston Boot and Shoe club, she introduced the term oekology. The
headlines in the newspaper the next day read, "New Science, Mrs. Richards Names it
Oekology." To Ellen Swallow Richards, ecology was the study of the human home, a
point in a larger framework of the community. Water flowed into it and out of it, air
surrounded it, and fertile soils produced nutritious food.14
The second challenge to the mechanistic world view came from the sciences of
relativity and quantum mechanics, in the early twentieth
century. Einstein's relativity theory postulated that fields
with varying strengths spread out in space. Strong, stable
areas, much like whirlpools in a flowing stream, represented
particles. They interacted with and modified each other, but
were still considered external to and separate from each other. Quantum mechanics
mounted a greater challenge. Motion was not continuous, as in mechanistic science, but
occurred in leaps. Particles, such as electrons, behaved like waves, while waves, such as
light waves, behaved like particles, depending on the experimental context. Context
dependence, which was antithetical to mechanism and part of the organic worldview, was
a fundamental characteristic of matter.15
A third challenge to mechanism came in the 1970s and 1980s from the sciences of
chaos and complexity theory. Edward Lorenz's work on chaos theory, for which he won
the 1983 Crafoord Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, led him to question
the possibility of finding suitable linear prediction formulas for weather forecasting and
instead to develop models based on nonlinear equations. Lorenz’s 1972 paper was
14
entitled, “Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s
Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas.” He argued
that irregularity is a fundamental property of the
atmosphere and that the rapid doubling of errors from the
effects of physical features precludes great accuracy in
real-world forecasting. Most environmental and
biological systems, such as changing weather,
population, noise, aperiodic heart fibrillations, and
ecological patterns, may in fact be governed by non-linear chaotic relationships.16
We must therefore relinquish the mechanistic worldview's idea that we can
predict everything in the natural world and hence humanity's ability to dominate and
control nature. Classical physics and mechanistic science hold well in many dimensions
of the world in which we live, but that world is nevertheless a limited domain of human
experience. The unusual situations are in fact the closed systems of classical mechanics
where prediction works well. However, the usual situation, rather than this very narrow
domain, is that nature is fundamentally unpredictable. In the open systems of ecology,
chaos, and complexity theory, prediction is far more difficult. Hence there is a need for a
new ethic, based not on the prediction and control of nature, but instead on a human
partnership with nature.
The Need for a New Ethic—A Partnership Ethic
For the twenty-first century, I propose a new kind of environmental ethic—a
partnership ethic. It is based on the idea that people and nature are equally important. If
15
both people and nature are acknowledged to have rights, we have the possibility of a
mutually beneficial situation.
A partnership ethic holds that the greatest good for the human and nonhuman
communities is in their mutual living interdependence.17
Like the Native American idea of a sacred bundle of relationships and obligations,
a partnership ethic is grounded in the ideas of relation and of mutual obligation.
Partnership is a word that is experiencing a renaissance in the discourse of the
business and environmental communities. Successful environmental partnerships,
focused on resolving policy conflicts surrounding local issues, are forming among
corporations, local communities, government agencies, and environmental organizations.
Trees, rivers, endangered species, tribal groups, minority coalitions, and citizen activists
all find representation along with business at the negotiating table. The partnership
process offers a new approach to collaboration.18
Equally innovative is the idea that the term "partners" refers not only to societal
entities and institutions, but to individuals and even natural entities. Domestic partners
with legal status may include not only married couples but stable relationships between
men and women, women and women, and men and men. A partnership ethic may offer
guidelines for moving beyond the rhetoric of environmental conflict and toward a
discourse of cooperation. But the term "partner" can also be used to represent
gnatcatchers, coho salmon, grizzly bears, and checkerspot butterflies. Indeed, nonhuman
nature itself can be our partner.19
A human community in a sustainable relationship with a nonhuman community is
based on the following precepts:
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• Equity between the human and nonhuman communities.
• Moral consideration for both humans and other species.
• Respect for both cultural diversity and biodiversity.
• Inclusion of women, minorities, and nonhuman nature in the code of ethical
accountability.
• An ecologically sound management that is consistent with the continued health
of both the human and the nonhuman communities.20
A partnership ethic entails a viable, sustainable relationship between a human community
and a nonhuman community in a particular place, a place in which connections to the
larger world are recognized through economic and ecological exchanges. It is an ethic in
which humans act to fulfill both humanity's vital needs and nature's needs by restraining
human hubris. It draws on the 1992 Rio Declaration's "global partnership to conserve,
protect, and restore the health of the earth's ecosystems." It incorporates the 1991 Global
Assembly of Women and the Environment's concept of "partner's in life" and it reinforces
the principle of the 1991 National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit
that "environmental justice demands the right to participate as equal partners at every
level of decision-making." Guided by a partnership ethic, people will select technologies
that sustain the natural environment by becoming co-workers and partners with
nonhuman nature, not dominators over it.21
A partnership ethic recognizes both continuities and differences between humans
and nonhuman nature. It admits that humans are part of and dependent on nature and that
nonhuman nature has preceded and will postdate human nature. But also it recognizes
that humans now have the power, knowledge, and technology to destroy life as we know
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it today. A partnership ethic therefore goes beyond egocentric and homocentric ethics in
which the good of the human community wins out over the good of the biotic community
to a new ethic which entails the good of both the human and the more-than-human
communities. In some cases the needs of the more-than-human community will take
precedence, as in preservation of wild areas, while in others, the needs of the human
community will be paramount, as in sustainable agriculture and sustainable cities.22
Roots of a Partnership Ethic
In a partnership ethic, both humans and nature are active agents.
Both the needs of nature to continue to exist and the basic needs of
human beings must be considered. As George Perkins Marsh put it in
1864, humanity should "become a co-worker with nature in the
reconstruction of the damaged fabric," by restoring the waters,
forests, and bogs "laid waste by human improvidence or malice."
While thunderstorms, tornados, volcanos, and earthquakes represented nature's power
over humanity to rearrange elementary matter, humans had the power "irreparably to
derange the combinations of inorganic matter and of organic life, which through the night
of aeons she [nature] had been proportioning and balancing. . . ."23
Ecologist Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) formulated a land
ethic in which farmland could be thought of in terms of
partnership. In a 1939 essay on “The Farmer as a
Conservationist,” he wrote: "When land does well for its owner,
and the owner does well by his land; when both end up better by
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reason of their partnership, we have conservation." Leopold advocated a range of human
partnerships with the land that could result in protection of wild areas, farmland
restoration, and sustainable agricultural practices.24
Women have also contributed to the idea of partnership. Riane Eisler, in The
Chalice and the Blade (1988), argued that an original partnership society in prehistory
took a 5000 year detour into a dominator society. In the dominator model, symbolized by
the blade, one sex is ranked higher than the other. The partnership model, symbolized by
the chalice, is based on male-female linking, rather than ranking, and its recovery offers
hope for an egalitarian political and economic society in the future. In Sacred Pleasure,
Eisler proposed a new "politics of partnership" based on nurturing and caring forms of
socialization for both sexes and a grassroots politics of social equity. "Much in Western
prehistory seems to prefigure the more partnership-oriented world view [that is] today
struggling to emerge. . . . New beliefs, images, and stories more congruent with a
partnership than dominator social organization [are] beginning to enter our
consciousness. . . ." The future would thus be the product of new Eves and new Adams
who would work together, making the "realities and myths of our future . . . very
different from what they are now.25
In Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993), Australian philosopher Val
Plumwood argues that relation must be the basis for a new ethic, one that is rooted in
continuity and difference, rather than mastery and colonization. "The relational self
delineates the general structure of a relationship of respect, friendship, or care for the
other." Plumwood draws on feminist ideals for non-dominating interactions among
persons and the natural world, such as care, benevolence, and solidarity, that would allow
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the earth community to flourish. Such qualities
avoid the intense separation of self from world
characteristic of the mechanistic, instrumental
approach that masters nature as a slave. She argues:
"The reason/nature story has been the master story
of western culture. It is a story which has spoken
mainly of conquest and control, of capture and use,
of destruction and incorporation. . . . Much inspiration for new, less destructive stories
can be drawn from sources other than the master, from subordinated and ignored parts of
western culture, such as women's stories of care."26
To achieve a partnership with nature, we need to hear nature's voice. Nature
speaks to us through senses other than the written and spoken word. Philosopher David
Abram invites us into a more-than-human world that through the semi-permeable
membranes of our bodies allows us to communicate with nature through sensuous
experience. Oral cultures maintain that contact better than those influenced by the
written word, but such consciousness can be reclaimed by listening to the voice of nature:
"The rustling of leaves in an oak tree or an aspen grove," Abram writes, "is itself a kind
of voice." With the use of the alphabet, however, a barrier develops between the human
as self and nature as other. Nevertheless the writer's task is to release "the budded,
earthly intelligence of our words, freeing them to respond to the speech of the things
themselves—to the green uttering-forth of leaves from the spring branches." As we use
narrative to recreate the human place in the more-than-human world, we can learn to
reconnect with nature as an equal partner. For Abram that reconnection occurs through,
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"the practice of spinning stories that have the rhythm and lilt of the local soundscape,
tales for the tongue, tales that want to be told, again and again." The nature writer,
philosopher, and poet can help us hear nature's voice by "finding phrases that place us in
contact with the trembling neck-muscles of a deer holding its antlers high as it swims
toward the mainland, or with the ant dragging a scavenged rice-grain through the grasses.
. . letting language take root, once again, in the earthen silence of shadow and bone and
leaf.”27
Putting Partnership Ethics into Practice
How can a partnership ethic be put into practice? What are some living examples
of human partnerships with nature? One way is through designing new landscapes and
communities. In working with nature, planners and
designers work cooperatively, not only with nature and
local communities, but also with each other to achieve
their goals. Men and women are both well-represented.
Behind the partnership ethic lies an implicit assumption.
Teams of men and women, women and women, men and men are equals. Moreover,
Nature, traditionally represented as mother, virgin, or witch, is not gendered as female to
be managed, controlled, or exploited, but instead is accepted as a partner with humanity.
Such cooperation, revealed in the resultant landscape designs, presents exciting new
opportunities for working with nature. How have the precepts of partnership ethics
helped to shape design?28
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Partnership ethics makes visible the connections between people and the
environment in an effort to find new cultural and economic forms that fulfill vital needs,
provide security, and enhance the quality of life without degrading the local or global
environment. It creates both a structure and a set of goals that can enable decisionmaking, consensus, and mediation to be achieved without contentious litigation. It
relates work in the sciences of ecology, chaos, and complexity theory to new possibilities
for non-dominating relationships between humans and nonhuman nature.
While hydrological forces and turbulent water flows exemplify one type of chaos,
fire represents another. Fire can strike suddenly, roar into violent action, and in minutes
completely envelop a natural area that has emerged slowly over time through ecological
processes. How can humans be partners with a
phenomenon so deadly and potentially destructive as
wildfire? One way is to practice wise restraint by
not building structures with fire-prone materials
such as shake roofs or allowing dry vegetation to
accumulate near residences. This is especially
important in urban areas and in suburbs near arid
grasslands and chaparral. Another way to work with
fire is to learn from the history of past fire policies such as the hundred-year firesuppression regime adhered to in Yellowstone National Park between its creation in 1872
and its reassessment in 1972. David Kovacic constructed animations of fires in
Yellowstone. His simulation models were useful tools in understanding how local
ecologies respond to fire. Frequent, cool, ground fires enhance ecological diversity by
22
opening up understories to forage, increasing varieties of plants and wildlife, and
rejuvenating old growth. Wisely used, fire can become a tool in a new human
partnership with nature.29
In Bladensburg, Maryland, the Anacostia River had been confined to a concrete
channel built many years ago by the Army Corps of Engineers, the flow managed by
pumps and flood gates on the premise that nature was
controllable through engineering. Joseph Kevin Eades
redesigned the landscape, allowing Nature's older meander to
be revealed by allowing the river to assume its former course
through the center of town. The new channels were lined with
native riparian vegetation and wetlands were reestablished to
aid in removing pollutants. Restoring the river's ecological
integrity allowed nature to become a partner with the town residents. By permitting the
river to act freely, it removed stormwater runoff, provided habitat for riparian bird and
animal life, and offered possibilities for river walkways that linked people to nature.30
A partnership ethic respects both cultural diversity and biodiversity. In the hills
above Oakland, California, a culturally diverse middle-class neighborhood consisting of a
majority of African Americans
along with many European,
Asian, and Latin Americans
worked in partnership with each
other and with landscape architect
Louise Mozingo of the University
23
of California, Berkeley. The goal was to restore biodiversity to the oak groves from
which the city derived its name and ecological heritage.31
Ecological and human health can also be restored to abandoned urban industrial
sites through a "windows of opportunity" program such as that devised by Achva
Benzinberg Stein and Norman Millar in Los Angeles, California. Here, former industrial
areas, asphalt parking lots, freeway residual areas, and vacant urban lots are turned into
opportunities for growing non-food crops with treated gray water, recreation sites for
underprivileged children,
community gardens, and solar
farms atop parking structures.
In this case, ethnically and
culturally diverse communities
entered into partnerships with
each other and with sunshine,
rainwater, fragile soils, and native plants to reclaim green open spaces that benefit both
human and nonhuman health.32
Conclusion
The above examples show that humanity can indeed learn to listen to Nature's
voice as revealed through ecological principles, ethics, poetry, and a reverence for our
nonhuman partner. Although, as partner, Nature's language differs from our own, we still
have the possibility of working cooperatively with it. The result is a healthier, more
aesthetically pleasing environment for our own and future generations.33
24
Notes
* Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, University of
California, Berkeley. Based on the Bernard Moses Lecture, Graduate Division,
University of California, Berkeley, May 4, 2010. The following text and ideas are drawn
from Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific
Revolution (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1980, 2nd ed. 1990); Merchant, Reinventing
Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 2003); and the
articles cited below. These books and others by Carolyn Merchant can be viewed at
http://www.bikingbooks.com/html/merchant.html.
For access to Carolyn Merchant's webpage, a link to the online Moses lecture, and
downloadable pdf copies of the articles cited below go to:
http://nature.berkeley.edu/merchant
1
Carolyn Merchant, "The Violence of Impediments: Francis Bacon and the Origins of
Experimentation," Isis, 99 (2008): 731-760, see p. 735.
2
Merchant, "Violence of Impediments," p. 739.
3
Merchant, "Violence of Impediments," p. 739.
4
Merchant, "Violence of Impediments," p. 739.
5
Merchant, Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture (New York:
Routledge, 2003), p. 75.
6
Merchant, "Violence of Impediments," p. 753.
7
Merchant, "Violence of Impediments," pp. 754-5.
8
Merchant, "Secrets of Nature: The Bacon Debates Revisited," Journal of the History of
Ideas, 69, no. 1 (January 2008): 147-162, see pp. 156-157.
9
Merchant, "Violence of Impediments," p. 756.
10
Merchant, "Violence of Impediments," p. 758.
11
Merchant, "Violence of Impediments," p. 759.
12
Merchant, "The Scientific Revolution and the Death of Nature," Isis, 97, no. 3
(September 2006): 513-533, see p. 532.
13
Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940
(Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1982); Rossiter, Women Scientists in
America: Before Affirmative Action, 1940-1972 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University
Press, 1995).
14
Robert Clarke, Ellen Swallow: The Woman Who Founded Ecology (New York: Follett,
1973), pp. 26-54, 99-120; Carolyn Merchant, American Environmental History: An
Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 253-254.
15
Merchant, Reinventing Eden, pp. 109-110; David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate
Order (New York: Routledge, 1980), p. 195.
16
Merchant, Reinventing Eden, pp. 212-213; Edward Lorenz, “Predictability: Does the
Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil Set off a Tornado in Texas,” in Lorenz, The Essence
of Chaos (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993), pp. 181-184, originally
25
presented to the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science, December 29, 1972.
17
Merchant, Reinventing Eden, p. 223.
18
Merchant, Reinventing Eden, p. 223-224.
19
Merchant, Reinventing Eden, p. 224.
20
Merchant, Reinventing Eden, p. 224.
21
Merchant, Reinventing Eden, pp. 224-225.
22
Merchant, Reinventing Eden, p. 229.
23
Merchant, Reinventing Eden, p. 231.
24
Merchant, Reinventing Eden, p. 231.
25
Merchant, Reinventing Eden, p. 232.
26
Merchant, Reinventing Eden, p. 232; Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of
Nature (New York: Routledge, 1993, quotations on pp. 155, 196.
27
Merchant, Reinventing Eden, p. 227; David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous:
Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York: Vintage, 1996),
pp. 256, 273, 274.
28
Merchant, Reinventing Eden, p. 233.
29
Merchant, Reinventing Eden, pp. 237-238.
30
Merchant, Reinventing Eden, p. 237.
31
Merchant, Reinventing Eden, p. 238.
32
Merchant, Reinventing Eden, p. 239.
33
Merchant, Reinventing Eden, p. 239.